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Copper Stoppers

Earl and Jonathan, my ignoramuses, do you honestly believe that the goodly reverend was stopped and searched by the Torrance police solely because he was black? If so, then I must differ.

First, let me get something off my chest here. While I’ve only been stopped whenever I’ve done something that violates the rules of the road like failing to yield to traffic, driving on the shoulder of the road when I’ve been in a hurry or over some inanimate object like a kid’s skateboard, I therefore have no idea what it’s like to drive around in a decidedly ethnic skin, so I blend in with most of them the way peanut butter blends with jelly, the way the way chocolate blends with mousse or a burger and fries. So, mea culpa, I am a novitiate in the profiling department.

Yet the police weren’t the bad guys here. Had they hit the goodly reverend with a baton or thrown his Bible onto the freeway for having the King James rather than the other version, then that would be one thing. But the car fit the description from a violent kidnapping; the man did not, but for all they knew, maybe the felon had changed places with his kindly uncle from Phoenix who happened to be the good reverend himself. Maybe. Was it racial profiling? Maybe or maybe not. Saying that all Torrance traffic officers who stop blacks and Latinos are rogue cops is also a form of cop profiling where their every look, motive and eyeball is placed in a giant negative hopper of bad cop motives. Considering how far the pendulum has swung in the other direction after the Rodney King beating, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of our boys in blue sat in precinct offices having the following conversations.

McNamara: Have you met your black and white quota for the week, O’Toole?

O’Toole: You can see for yerself, McNamara. Almost. The scorecard’s on the wall right behind you. Five blacks, three whites, a pregnant Hispanic lady and an Asian family pulling into a church parking lot.

McNamara: You’re slipping, O’Toole. You’re slipping. You’ve got to get that quota up in terms of the Hispanics and whites. Tell you what, the next time you see a black run a red light even if it looks like he’s on a drug run, let him go and concentrate on the Koreans driving around Koreatown. Otherwise, the sarge’s not gonna look too good at the next news conference. I’m winning. Go fish. ”

The thirty protestors who showed up at Reverend Taylor’s rally ought to adopt the words of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at least when judging others behind the wheel. “Judge people not by the color of their skin by the content of their (driving) character.” Amen to that.